Obama reminded us again in his press conference "he' is the president of the United States and 'we' must act responsible. By that, Obama means 'we' must pay more taxes because 'he' has no intention of cutting spending. It's all about Congress not doing its job while he has been doing his.
President Obama says he is "amused" when people say he needs to get more involved in the debt crisis talks currently being led by Vice President Joe Biden.
"If you know you have to do something, just do it. And I have to say, I am very amused when I start hearing comments about 'well the President needs to show more leadership on this.' Let me tell you something: Right after we finished dealing with the government shutdown, averting a government shutdown, I called the leaders here together. I said we have to get this done," President Obama said at a press conference this afternoon.
Obama told Congress it is up to them and "they need to do their job."
"Now's the time to go ahead and make the tough choices, that's why they're called leaders," he said.
Obama continued by telling us he has been busy killing bin Laden, bringing the troops home from Afghanistan blah, blah, blah, blah but he did not mention he has also been busy throwing our friends and allies under the bus etc, all the while finding time for golf.
Obama seems to forget Rep. Ryan laid out a program. What was Obama's response? He sneered. Obama likes to pick fights with those who do not agree with him. He thinks that is leadership. He snipes, he jokes and he lies. That is what he believes is leadership.
Obama lectures us as if he knows what is going on and we are too dumb to understand. Obama expects us to swallow his snide explanations and that he is doing something about our problems but he is so full of himself and so engaged in blame gaming others he loses all credibility as if he ever had any.
Sure glad Obama does not hold more frequent press conferences because it is just more long winded answers and blame crap from our narcissistic president.
Where's the leadership we need? Well it ain't to be found in The White House! (See 1,1a, 1b and 1c below.)
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When you cannot reason with terrorists turn on your government and blame them as if that will produce results you seek.
When you are dealing with a leader who succumbs to pressure it will not produce anything but more concessions which terror groups simply use as they add to their demands. But then liberals and blind pacifiers never learn and leaders who cave into their demands are also fools.
Political leadership is convincing people to come around to your viewpoint and that takes skills , the courage of your convictions, and the willingness to bide time and endure the pain. Reagan understood this and even GW did as well but he lacked Reagan's speechifying talents.
The press attacked Reagan and portrayed him as a buffoon but laughed it off because he knew he was right and was comfortable in his own skin. Netanyahu might have a more difficult situation but he seems a bit more thin skinned and less humorous.(See 2 below.)
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Dick
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1)Obama: Republican Leaders Must Bend on Taxes
By MICHAEL D. SHEAR
President Obama said Wednesday that he believed Republicans would concede to tax increases as part of a deficit reduction package in time to avoid a default on the nation’s debt, and voiced exasperation at the lack of progress in negotiations between the administration and Congressional leaders.
“Call me naïve,” he told reporters at a midday news conference in the East Room of the White House. “But my expectation is that leaders are going to lead.”
He accused the Republicans, who last week dropped out of negotiations on the budget, of avoiding tough decisions and said they were playing a dangerous game that could significantly affect the nation’s struggling economy and capital markets and slow down private efforts to create jobs.
Mr. Obama repeatedly mocked tax breaks that he said were for “millionaires and billionaires, oil companies and corporate jet owners,” saying that voters would not look kindly on Republican lawmakers who defended such breaks at the cost of cuts in popular programs like health care, education and food safety.
But he did not explicitly say that he would reject a deal that did not eliminate such breaks, saying that he believed his adversaries would eventually agree to what Democrats have called a “balanced approach” that included trillions of dollars in spending cuts along with tax increases.
“If you are a wealthy C.E.O. or hedge fund manager in America right now, your taxes are lower than they have ever been. They are lower than they have been since the 1950s. And they can afford it,” Mr. Obama said. “You can still ride on your corporate jet. You’re just going to have to pay a little more.”
The speaker of the House, John A. Boehner, issued a blistering response, accusing the president of ignoring “legislative and economic reality” and of being AWOL in the debate over efforts to reduce national spending.
“His administration has been burying our kids and grandkids in new debt and offered no plan to rein in spending,” Mr. Boehner said in a statement.
The speaker reiterated his opposition to tax increases and said Mr. Obama was “sorely mistaken” if he believed that tax increase would pass in the House. He vowed that House Republicans would block anything that includes increased taxes.
“The longer the president denies these realities, the more difficult he makes this process,” Mr. Boehner said. “If the president embraces a measure that meets these tests, he has my word that the House will act on it. Anything less cannot pass the House.”
Questions about the looming debt deadline dominated the early part of the news conference, the first in several months for the president. But Mr. Obama was also asked about a series of other domestic and foreign policy issues.
On the American intervention in Libya, Mr. Obama defended his administration’s actions against Congressional critics who say the military activities there violate the War Powers Act, which requires Congress to give its formal approval.
“We have engaged in a limited operation to help a lot of people against one of the worst tyrants in the world,” Mr. Obama said, deflecting a question about whether he believes the War Powers Act is constitutional. “This suddenly becomes the cause célèbre for some folks in Congress? C’mon.”
On the issue of same-sex marriage, Mr. Obama declined to say whether he had changed his mind about his personal opposition. But he said New York’s decision to legalize same sex marriage was a “good thing.”
“That’s exactly how things should work,” he said, noting that different communities will come to different conclusions on the issue. “I think we are moving in a direction of greater equality, and I think that’s a good thing.”
Mr. Obama said his administration had done more than all of his predecessors combined to advance the rights of gay men and lesbians in America. Mr. Obama is scheduled to host a gay pride event at the White House on Wednesday afternoon.
But his remarks are likely to disappoint gay activists, who were hoping that Mr. Obama would say that his personal opposition to gay marriage had ended. In the past, the president has said his position is “evolving.”
On the economy, Mr. Obama sounded dire warnings about the consequences of delaying a resolution on the debt negotiations, and expressed exasperation with Republicans in Congress, saying they needed to “do their job” instead of blaming him for a lack of leadership.
In a remarkable display of frustration, Mr. Obama said he was “amused” by Republican comments that he had not offered a clear direction in the effort to cut the budget and increase the nation’s debt ceiling.
“They are in one week, they are out one week,” the president said, in a week that the House is out of session. “You need to be here. I’ve been here. I’ve been doing Afghanistan and Bin Laden and the Greek crisis. You stay here. Let’s get it done. All right, I think you know my feelings about that.”
Mr. Obama compared the lack of resolution in the debt talks to his daughters’ ability to get their homework done a day early.
“They’re not waiting til the night before. They are not pulling all-nighters,” Mr. Obama said. “They need to do their job. They need to go ahead and make the tough choices.”
Mr. Obama also mocked Republicans in Congress who have questioned whether the Aug. 2 deadline set by the Treasury Department for a default on the debt has been hyped for political reasons. He said the people making those claims would force the government to pick and choose who they would pay and who they would leave hanging.
“This is not a situation where Congress is going to say we won’t buy this car or we won’t take the vacation. They took the vacation. They bought the car. And now they are saying, maybe we don’t have to pay,” Mr. Obama said. “If the United States government, for the first time, cannot pay its bills, if it defaults, then the consequences for the U.S. economy will be significant and unpredictable. And that is not a good thing.”
In his opening statement, Mr. Obama said his administration was making efforts to spur job creation, but challenged Congress to pass bills that would help private companies add to their payrolls. He cited bills that would make it easier to get patents on inventions, expand loans to private businesses for hiring and pass long-delayed trade deals.
“I urge Congress to act on these ideas right now,” he said.
On the debt talks, Mr. Obama said he was open to extending payroll tax cuts and other tax breaks that would help spur economic growth in the short term. “I think that it makes perfect sense for us to take a look at can we extend the payroll tax cut another year?” the president told reporters. “What we need to do is to restore business confidence and the confidence of the American people that we are on track.”
The president declined to comment on a controversial decision by the National Labor Relations Board to go to court to contest a decision by Boeing to build a nonunion plant in South Carolina. The decision by the independent agency has been criticized by Republicans as an infringement on right-to-work states and on the right of corporate managers to decide where to do business. The case is before a judge in Seattle.
But the president acknowledged the political sensitivities of the issue at a time when people are clamoring for the kinds of jobs that the Boeing plant would create. “If they are choosing to relocate here in the U.S., that’s a good thing,” Mr. Obama said. “What defies common sense is the notion that we would be shutting down a plant or laying off workers because labor and management can’t come to an agreement.”
Asked about concern in the military that the policy on how to handle terrorist suspects captured abroad was unclear, Mr. Obama said that his “top priority” was “to make sure that we are apprehending those who would attack the United States, and that we are getting all the intelligence that we can.”
But he said that “frankly, there are going to be different dispositions of the case depending on the situation.”
Pressed a second time on his personal views of same-sex marriage, Mr. Obama declined to elaborate, saying, “I’m not going to make news on that today” and telling the reporter who asked, Laura Meckler of The Wall Street Journal, “Good try, though.”
Later, Mr. Obama added: “I’ll keep on giving you the same answer until I give you a different one. And that won’t be today.”
1a)ObamaCare Doesn't Add Up
A new CBO report finds that the costs of Medicare and Medicaid will drive federal spending to all-time highs in coming decades.
By STEPHEN MOORE
Remember the much ballyhooed ObamaCare promise to "bend the health care cost curve down"?
Well, a new Congressional Budget Office report on the long-term trend in the federal budget finds that the costs of Medicare and Medicaid will drive federal spending and debt to all-time highs in coming decades. In one scenario, federal health-care spending doubles over the next 25 years, to 11% of GDP in 2035 from 5.6% this year. In another scenario, the debt eclipses 100% of GDP by 2021 and 190% of GDP by 2035. That's higher than where Greece is right now, and we see what the bond vigilantes are doing there.
What is conspicuously missing from this report is the magical windfall from the new health law. CBO reports that it is "using the same growth rates that would have been applied in the absence of the legislation." Now they tell us. Hence, Medicare alone is projected to nearly double over the next 25 years, from 3.7% of GDP to almost 7% by 2035.
CBO warns that ObamaCare's purported payment cuts to doctors and hospitals and the hoped-for reductions in the growth of the insurance subsidies would be "difficult to sustain over a long period." Let us translate all this mumbo jumbo: The ObamaCare cost savings are mostly bunk.
None of these scary trends is inevitable, and there is still time to get health-care costs contained. But now even CBO seems to agree that ObamaCare bends our health-care bills up, not down, in the long run.
1b)Obama picks fight with GOP over tax cuts for the rich
By Greg Sargent
The primary goal of President Obama’s presser, which just wrapped up, was obvious: He was clearly out to pick a major public fight with Republicans over tax cuts for the rich. Obama mounted a surprisingly aggressive moral case for ending high end tax cuts, casting it as a test of our society’s priorities, and argued — crucially — that anyone who fails to support ending them is fundamentally unserious about the deficit.
He also went out of his way to highlight GOP opposition to raising revenues by ending a perk for corporate jet owners. This proposal would raise only $3 billion, which means it’s trivial in the larger scheme of things, and Obama’s mention of it seemed deliberately designed to provoke howls of outrage and cries of “class warfare” from Republicans — with the obvious goal of maneuvering Republicans into the role of arch defenders of the interests of the wealthy.
Obama is picking this fight in order to reframe the deficit and debt ceiling debate as a battle not over government spending — losing turf for Dems — but over who has the most balanced priorities and who is really working in the interests of the whole country.
Here’s the key quote, which mentions the corporate jet tax break no less than three times:
If we choose to keep those tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires, if we keep the tax break for corporate jet owners, if we choose to keep tax breaks for oil and gas companies that are making hundreds of billions of dollars, then that means we’ve got to cut some kids off from getting a college scholarship. That means we have to stop funding certain grants for medical research. That means that food safety may be compromised. That means that Medicare has to bear a greater part of the burden. These are the choices we have to make...
The Republicans say they want to reduce the deficit. Every single observer who’s not an elected official or politican says we can’t reduce our deficit in the scale and scope we need to without having a balanced approach that looks at everything. Democrats have to accept some painful spending cuts that hurt some of our consituencies that we may not like. And we’ve shown a willingness to do that for the greater good...
If you are a wealthy CEO or hedge fund manager in America right now, your taxes are lower than they’ve ver been. They’re lower than they’ve been since the 1950s. And you can afford it. You’ll still be able to ride on your corporate jet. You’ll just have to pay a little more...My believe is that the Republican leadership in Congress will hopefully sooner rather than later come to the conclusion that they need to make the right decisions for the country, that everybody else has been willing to move off their maximalist position. They need to do the same. My expectation is that they’ll do the responsible thing.
In another key moment, Obama seemed to draw a line against cost-shifting to seniors to solve the Medicare problem. He said:
We’re gonna have to look at entitlements. And that’s always difficult politically. But I’ve been willing to say we need to see where we can reduce the cost of health care spending and Medicare and Medicaid in the out years. Not by shifting costs on to seniors, as some have proposed, but rather by actually reducing those costs.
While there’s good reason for skepticism that the final deal won’t contain some kind of cost shifting, it was good to hear Obama lay down that marker in those terms.
More broadly, Obama stopped just short of saying he would not accept a final deficit deal without a high end tax hike. But his presser made it clear that he will will relitigate this fight and make it central to the campaign. And while we should keep in mind that Obama did ultimately cut a deal on the high-end tax cuts last time around, those who are hoping he will continue to make a strong moral argument in favor of ending them should be pleased by what they heard.
1c)Obamanomics is shovel-ready
The failure of Keynesian economics is no laughing matter, Mr. President
By Dr. Milton R. Wolf
In 1932, President Hoover received a letter from a man in Illinois that read simply, “Vote for Roosevelt and make it unanimous.” Based on its recent floundering, it seems even the White House recognizes that Obamanomics has been a disaster. It’s nearly unanimous now.
When President Reagan entered office, America faced a deep recession with double-digit unemployment and inflation, plus dishearteningly long gas lines. Rather than wasting time blaming his predecessor, the Gipper went right to work unveiling Reaganomics - an embrace of the free market - which included four simple principles: (1) lower tax burden, (2) lower government spending, (3) lower regulatory burden, and (4) a strong dollar monetary policy.
The top income tax rate was reduced from a stifling 70 percent to a low of 28 percent. Total federal spending was reduced from 23.5 percent of gross domestic product to 21.2 percent. Deregulation ended disastrous price controls and curtailed the government’s micromanaging of private businesses. Disciplined money supply strengthened the dollar.
As Peter Ferrara, policy adviser to Reagan, has described, the results were beyond spectacular. Reaganomics unleashed an explosive growth of wealth and prosperity, the largest in the history of humankind. Some 20 million jobs were created. Unemployment dropped to 5.3 percent. The gross domestic product growth rate hit a high of 6.8 percent, and the total economy grew by nearly a third. Inflation dropped to 3.2 percent. Even the oil shortage was solved almost overnight.
Barack Obama is no Ronald Reagan.
President Obama entered office peddling the false hope that government can “spread the wealth.” This is as foolish as bucketing water from one end of a swimming pool to the other. At best you achieve nothing; in reality, the spilled water along the way leaves everybody worse off.
Obamanomics favors top-down compulsory cooperation over voluntary. It is the anti-Reaganomics. Mr. Obama has done the following: (1) raised taxes, (2) unleashed a wild orgy of spending, including his disastrous so-called “stimulus,” (3) dramatically increased regulations and even nationalized industries and businesses, and (4) printed money out of “quantitative easing” thin air.
The results were predictable. Since the Obama stimulus - a collection of “shovel-ready” projects promised to save the economy - was signed into law, America has lost 1.9 million jobs and unemployment has surpassed 9 percent. GDP growth remains anemic. Consumer confidence has tumbled. Gas prices were at $1.81 per gallon before Mr. Obama put his “boot on the neck” of suppliers, and now it’s more than doubled, to $3.81. We burn our food supply in our gas tanks, and grocery prices have skyrocketed - some staples by as much as 40 percent. Since the president signed his mortgage rescue plan, Americans have seen 3.82 million foreclosures. Most disturbingly, the majority of Americans are receiving some type of welfare.
Want to better understand Obamanomics? Look no further than “cash for clunkers,” Mr. Obama’s laughably misguided idea to use American’s wealth to, quite literally, destroy American’s wealth, to use taxpayers’ money to destroy taxpayers’ working automobiles. Despite the propaganda, these weren’t “clunkers” at all. I continue proudly to drive one myself. Edmonds.com estimated the cost per new car sold at $24,000. Some estimates are much higher. A year later, auto sales were at their worst in 27 years and Americans - low-income Americans in particular - are suffering a government-created shortage of low-priced cars. Still the Democrats claim that the clunkers program “has been successful beyond our wildest dreams.” The truth is, it was motivated by environmentalism, not economics. It reflects Mr. Obama’s arrogant belief that he knows better than you what type of car you should drive. Controlling your behavior is one wild dream, indeed.
Mr. Obama, abandoning any pretense of economic literacy, has placed the blame for unemployment squarely on America’s archenemy: the ATM. The jobless rate remains high, according to the president, because - it’s hard to make this stuff up - “when you go to a bank you use the ATM, you don’t go to a bank teller.” Other Democrats share his ignorance. Recently, Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. claimed that Apple’s iPad was “probably responsible for eliminating thousands of American jobs.” Mr. Jackson, an iPad owner himself, adds hypoc-risy to ignorance.
Mr. Obama, meet Ned Ludd. In the early 1800s, the Luddites - named for Ned Ludd, an alias used to conceal their leaders’ true identities - sabotaged factories for fear of new technology. Their mistake was a belief that jobs themselves are prosperity when, in fact, it’s the products and services of those jobs that create prosperity. The government could hire people to dig holes and other people to fill them back in, but America would be poorer for the wasted effort. In reality, new technologies, from the advent of the wheel to today’s nanotechnology - including the ATM and the iPad - increase efficiency, which frees people for more important endeavors. This is the precise mechanism that improves mankind’s standard of living.
And now, as Obamanomics continues to crumble, the president has made a stunning admission: ” ‘Shovel-ready’ was not as shovel-ready as we expected.” The line drew laughter from his friendly audience. This is not the first time his own supporters have been caught laughing at Obamanomics. Last week - before the Democratic National Committee, no less - the president made this wild claim: “Over the last 15 months, we’ve created over 2.1 million private-sector jobs.” That despite the record showing America has 1.9 million fewer jobs today than before his “stimulus.” According to the White House’s own transcript, what followed next was “laughter” (until later, that is, when Orwellian Ministry of Truth officials in the administration scrubbed the record and changed the transcript to read “applause”).
Americans are suffering, Mr. President, and it’s no laughing matter. It’s time to put Obamanomics where it belongs: on the trash heap of history. Got a shovel?
Dr. Milton R. Wolf, a Washington Times columnist, is a board-certified diagnostic radiologist and President Obama’s cousin.
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2)The Invisible Palestinians
Caroline B. Glick
Like the rest of the Left, the media hold Israel responsible for Hamas’s imprisonment of Schalit because they perceive the Arabs generally and the Palestinians specifically as objects rather than actors.
Sunday was the first day of Sgt. Gilad Schalit’s sixth year in captivity. Schalit was kidnapped on June 26, 2006 and has been held hostage by Palestinian terrorists affiliated with Hamas in Gaza ever since.
For five years, Schalit has been held incognito. His terrorist captors have permitted him to send but one letter to his family and released but one video of Schalit over this entire period. He has been denied visits by the International Committee of the Red Cross. He was clearly emaciated in the video.
Over the past five years, Hamas has engaged in periodic indirect negotiations with Israel through a German mediator and others. While their demands have varied from time to time, essentially they want Israel to release around 1,500 terrorists from its prisons in exchange for Schalit. And they want the terrorists to be released to their homes in Judea and Samaria and Gaza where they can pick up killing Jews where they left off.
And it isn’t only Hamas demanding these things. In an interview with IMRA news agency on May 25, Fatah negotiator Nabil Shaath said that the Fatah supports Hamas’s demands. Shaath explained that once the Fatah-Hamas unity government is formed Schalit will become the responsibility of the unified Palestinian Authority.
The Palestinian Authority will continue to hold Schalit hostage and demand that Israel release thousands of terrorists as ransom for his release. As he put it, “We have 7,000 political prisoners in Israel by design – taken by the Israeli authority. They have to be also freed.”
So the Palestinian leadership from Fatah and Hamas alike are unified in their view that it is perfectly acceptable to hold Schalit captive. As far as they are concerned, it is acceptable to stand in breach of international law and basic standards of humanity in order to extort Israel to free mass murderers from prison. And it is acceptable to the Palestinians for these murderers to return to their work killing as many Jews as they can get their hands on.
It is hard to think of a more despicable comment on the state of Palestinian society than their wall to wall support for the taking and holding of hostages or their desire to see mass murderers released from jail. A person could be forgiven for thinking that on the fifth anniversary of Schalit’s abduction that the media would be full of articles describing in detail the evil that is Hamas and Fatah which celebrate Schalit’s victimization and the suffering of his family.
But that person would be wrong. The media coverage of the fifth anniversary of Schalit’s kidnap devoted no attention to his Palestinian captors. In fact, if a person were simply going by what he learned from the Israeli media over the past several days, he would likely believe that either Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is hiding Schalit in his cellar, or that Netanyahu is colluding with Hamas to keep Schalit captive in Gaza.
Aping the increasingly grotesque genre of reality television shows, local celebrities and washed-out headline-starved failed former security brass got together with Yediot Aharonot and put on a reality TV stunt for the public to mark the anniversary.
One after another these supposedly concerned citizens walked into a knock-off solitary confinement cell furnished with a dirty toilet and television cameras. The beautiful ones sighed, cried, kicked, and whined for an hour apiece. Their performances were broadcast live on Yediot’s Ynet news portal. Channel 2 rebroadcast the highlights on the evening news.
The purported goal of the campaign was to “raise public awareness,” about Schalit’s plight. As if the Israeli public isn’t aware of his plight. For the overwhelming majority of Israelis, the mention of Schalit’s name evokes profound concern and sorrow.
BUT THEN, Yediot knows that. And raising public awareness was not the goal of their televised pimping of Schalit’s suffering with the help of shameless celebrities and far-left retired generals. Their goal was to turn the public against Binyamin Netanyahu – Schalit’s imaginary jailer.
This message was delivered not only by the likes of radical failed Shin Beit chiefs Ami Ayalon and Carmi Gillon. It was delivered by Gilad Schalit’s father Noam Schalit at his press conference on Sunday.
Noam Schalit declared, “Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, you do not have the right to sentence Gilad to death. The weakness and the stubbornness you are showing in this crisis is an immediate danger for Gilad’s life and health. More than that, it is a danger for the values of the State of Israel, on which generations of Israelis were raised.” There is no doubt that Noam Schalit is acting as he is because he wants to get his son home alive. But there is also no doubt that by pressuring Netanyahu and the government and accusing them of being responsible for his son’s captivity, Noam Schalit is only making things worse.
Hamas wants to destroy Israel. Its terrorists in prison want to destroy Israel.
Hamas’s leaders view Schalit’s illegal incarceration and the anguish it causes in Israel as a source of pride for the movement and Palestinian society as a whole. It views the release of terrorists as a means of strengthening the jihadist movement politically and militarily.
Every time Noam Schalit blames the government for his son’s plight and demands that our leaders free terrorists to bring him home, he strengthens Hamas’s negotiating position.
On Sunday, Netanyahu admitted that the pressure worked. Netanyahu did in fact agree to what had been Hamas’s demands for the release of more than a thousand terrorists for Schalit and Hamas didn’t even bother responding to the offer. On Monday, Hamas said that Netanyahu’s offer was too low.
With Noam Schalit and the media in its court, Hamas knows there is no reason to rush into anything. So its leaders raised the price still further.
SINCE SCHALIT was first kidnapped, his family has repeatedly invoked the plight of IAF navigator Col. Ron Arad who was taken hostage by Shi’ite terrorists when his plane crashed in Lebanon in 1986. Arad has been held hostage for the past quarter century.
The Schalits say their pressure campaign against the government is fuelled by their desire to prevent their son from sharing Arad’s fate.
These statements show that the Schalits fundamentally misunderstand what happened to Arad and what is happening to Gilad. It wasn’t for lack of will that Israel has failed to bring Arad home. Arad disappeared because Israel never had good intelligence information about his whereabouts.
If it had, Arad would have been rescued, dead or alive. According to recently retired IDF chief of General Staff Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi, the same has been the case with Schalit.
In their refusal to recognize that they are hurting their son by directing their anger at the government rather than the Palestinians and their international supporters, the Schalits are unconscionably egged on by the media. As Yediot marked the fifth anniversary of Gilad’s internment with their celebrity solitary confinement stunt, Maariv marked the fifth anniversary by interviewing 25 celebrities about their activism on behalf of Schalit.
All these celebrity attacks on Netanyahu are consistent with the past five years of media coverage of Schalit’s confinement. It is also consistent with their past coverage of the captivity of every other IDF hostage taken by Arab terrorists in recent years.
THE SCHALIT family’s counterproductive behavior is the result of a combination of desperation, ignorance and manipulation by PR agencies. But what explains the media’s behavior? Why are they helping Hamas? Some media critics attribute their behavior to journalistic laziness and a desire to create sensational stories that will sell newspapers. No doubt there is some of that at work.
But lazy reporters and editors in search of screaming headlines have other options.
They could pit Noam Schalit against the father of one of the victims of the murderers whose release the Schalits and their supporters are demanding. That would make colorful page 1 copy.
The media could have a reporter spend an hour researching the Israeli and international self-described human rights community’s silence on Schalit’s plight and the shameless absence of any concerted demand by the self-proclaimed human rights community for his immediate release. Over the weekend, Israeli and international “human rights” groups B’Tselem, Amnesty International, Israel; Bimkom; Gisha; Human Rights Watch; International Federation for Human Rights; Palestinian Center for Human Rights, Gaza; Physicians for Human Rights, Israel; Public Committee Against Torture in Israel; and Yesh Din all got together to release a statement about Schalit. They failed to call for his immediate release.
Certainly a banner headline reporting this outrage would have sold papers.
All of these stories and journalistic stunts are low-cost and would sell newspapers.
And at a minimum, none of them would harm Schalit’s chances of getting released.
Yet the media have opted to sell the tale of the government’s culpability for his suffering due to its failure to bow to Hamas’s ever-escalating demands.
The media’s behavior is puzzling not merely because they have options besides supporting Hamas. It is puzzling because their obsessive coverage of Schalit arguably hurts their tireless efforts to sell the public on the notion that it is a terrific idea to give Judea and Samaria and parts of Jerusalem to Schalit’s captors. By reminding the public of Schalit, the media are also reminding the public that the Palestinians are not interested in peace and that they use the land Israel gives them to attack us. That is, their Schalit campaign undermines their appeasement campaign.
Finally, their demand that Netanyahu “release” Schalit is alienating their readers.
In the face of their intense campaign, “for Gilad” according to a poll published last month by Maariv, only 41 percent of the public agrees with their surrender at all cost strategy and 51 percent opposes it.
So by any rational measure, the media are acting against their own interests by pushing the pro-Hamas line. The only explanation that remains is irrational. But it is also consistent with the media’s serial irrationality on everything concerning Israel’s relationship with the Arab world generally and the Palestinians in particular.
The explanation is that like the rest of the Left – in Israel and worldwide – the media hold Israel responsible for Hamas’s imprisonment of Schalit because they perceive the Arabs generally and the Palestinians specifically as objects rather than actors. The only actors they see are Israel and the US.
Just as the international Left sends ships to aid and comfort Palestinian terrorists in Gaza to fight the so-called “occupation” which ended six years ago, so the Israeli media says the government is holding Gilad Schalit hostage. In both cases, the Palestinians are invisible, and inert.
To its credit, after five years of inaction, last Thursday, the Red Cross finally asked Hamas to prove Schalit is still alive. Gazans reacted to the move by attacking the Red Cross office in Gaza.
This major story received little mention in the media. And that makes sense. How can they cover a story about a group of people they can’t be bothered to notice?
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